Online Gaming – a Brief History

Online gaming is now an extremely popular activity with people from all over the world. A lot of people who are unable to access the facilities of a real land based casino such as the ones in Las Vegas because of their location or because of various other factors find online gaming a much easier option

This is because online gaming allows players to remain anonymous should any of them so choose. Many people prefer this option as they face no risk to their reputation and can game freely and as much as they like without anyone coming to find out. There is also the matter of easy accessibility, there is no travel required for one to visit an online casino and the only distance that one has to cover is from your fingers to your computer.

Before online gaming the player traffic was limited to real casinos like the Las Vegas ones and that was where you had to go if you wanted to experience the heady thrill of gambling and hoped to make some really big money in the easiest way possible. So how did the amazing phenomenon of online gaming come to be? And how did we go from gaming at a real casino to gaming at a virtual or online casino?

The entire story or history of online gaming began in 1970 with the creation of “Advent”.
This was a unique kind of interactive online game that went by the name of “Advent” and was created by a group of computer specialist researchers. The original game followed a text format and all players needed to do were use the simplest commands to play. The game was set in a virtual forest and the player had to control the character and cause it to do different sorts of actions for the game to be completed.

This was followed with the creation of other games and later by “Dungen” which was the first multi-player game that allowed players to compete with one another.

Soon after this casino games were introduced on the internet with software developed by Microgaming. A next stage of development was that of creating suitable payment methods for financial transactions like withdrawals and deposits in online casinos. Gradually online casinos were launched and licensed.

When online casinos and gaming sites were first launched, they did not draw much traffic as many people were not comfortable with playing for real online. Many doubted the authenticity and reliability of online transactions and just played for fun after downloading the games.

However with time as the online casinos proved their worth many people joined them and gamed for real. A survey conducted in the year 2001 revealed that over 8 million people had already played for real having made deposits at various online casinos.

In 2003 Chris Moneymaker won a poker tournament and took home over 2 million dollars having learned and practiced the game before hand at an online casino giving him an edge over his opponents. This resulted in many people flocking to the online casinos in the hopes of repeating his success story.